promoting gender equitable opportunities in agricultural ... - weman

ENTREPRENEURSHIPA focus on women’s critical rolesas producers and agriculturalwageworkers has sometimes beenat the expense of supporting womenagribusiness entrepreneurs. Womenentrepreneurs produce, managebusinesses and households, hireworkers, earn income, borrowand save, and provide a range ofservices for businesses in agriculturalvalue chains. They are a significantentrepreneurial force as owners offarms, input supply stores, servicedelivery businesses, and exportfirms whose contributions to local,box 17national, and global economies arefar reaching. Globally, women leadroughly 38 percent of all registeredsmall businesses (Box 17). 64The enterprising playing field is notequal. Women-owned businesses,despite their strengths, face differentconstraints from men-ownedbusinesses in growing and expandingtheir enterprises. Value chainprograms can help to overcome thebarriers women face in starting theirbusinesses, accessing credit, andnetworking. The result will identify andfoster women-owned businesses intobecoming lead firms and employersat multiple levels of the value chain.Women entrepreneurs are not anundifferentiated mass; a number offactors mediate their access to theWOMEN’S ENTREPRENEURSHIP: A GLOBAL SNAPSHOT✪✪ In Swaziland, women own 70 percent of micro-, small, andmedium enterprises.✪✪ Sixty-four percent of firms employing 10 people or more in Russiaare owned by women.✪✪ Women-owned businesses make up roughly 16 percent of allenterprises in Vietnam, not including jointly owned enterprises.✪✪ In Rwanda, women make up 58 percent of informal businesses and40 percent of formally registered businesses.✪✪ In Latin America, rough estimates suggest women own betweenone-quarter and one-third of all micro-, small, and mediumenterprises.✪✪ In 2004, women-owned businesses accounted for 47 percent ofsmall enterprises in Canada.✪✪ In China, 17 percent of the women-owned small businessesemploy more than 1,000 peopleSources: Gammage et al., “Enhancing Women’s Access to Markets”; IFC,“Voice of Women Entrepreneurs in Rwanda”; Weeks and Seiler, “Women’sEntrepreneurship in Latin America: An Exploration ofproductive resources that facilitatetheir entry into value chains asentrepreneurs. Like men, womenwho have initial endowments of landand financial capital are better poisedto enter markets than their lessasset-wealthy competitors. Womenentrepreneurs with little more thantheir labor to sell are likely to clusterin the informal economy, in smallproduction units that are unregisteredand where they may not pay taxeson income, labor, or capital. Thesesmaller women entrepreneurs facedifferent sets of opportunities andconstraints scaling up their economicactivities and entering new markets.Little sex-disaggregated data onentrepreneurship in agriculture isavailable, except in micro–foodprocessing and trading. Women areoften concentrated in small-scale,retail trading but are less representedas intermediaries or wholesalers (Box18). 65 Within this sector, women tradeparticular commodities, for example,products that are highly perishable. Ineastern Guinea, small-scale womentraders specialize in products withhigh levels of seasonality, while menare more often wholesalers, trading ina larger range of products. 66Donors in recent years are looking morecarefully at women entrepreneurs.The IFC’s Gender Program, forexample, highlights their presencein many sectors and countries andunderscores the persistent genderbasedconstraints they face. Inaddition to the constraints alreadydiscussed in other sections, thissection focuses on access to start-upcapital, perceptions about women inbusiness, and women’s time-povertyand mobility constraints.51